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Unive
Member Posts: 133
*DISCLAIMER* I AM NOT FLAMEING. So please if your on any medication for insanity go take a double dose immediately............................... 
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Anyway. Whys this game on the top? Ive seen all the movies on the main page read some stuff about the game but im still left speechless as to why people enjoy this game so much. So who would like to take a few minutes to explain to me why YOU like this game. What does it have that makes it different? 
Comments
try it, you'll find out...
but if you really want to know, read on.. a lot has been written in this forum, just click this
Watch Marco Antonio Barrera vs Amir Khan Live Free Video Streaming, Result
Try it and maybe you'll understand (it's free, you know).
It's a party based and turn based strategic combat MMO, which makes it old school and very different from all the EQ clones. It's got lots and lots of items, everything is craftable and sellable, no bind on equip, a great player based economy, and money + XP loss on death (again, old-school style). It's a fucking awesome game, I don't care what anyone says.
I agree, go try it. I recommend it.
I personally like this game because I find it both fun and relaxing. I enjoy the pace of the game as it is not too slow but at the same time not too fast. Being too slow was one reason I disliked maplestory, and well, as for an mmo feeling too fast, I'm not sure about that one yet. I enjoy just about everything in this game, from the stratagy in combat, to the simple yet addictive crafting and enchanting systems, to how the economy works in the game. The only real aspect of this game that I don't find good is that its a bit on the linear side, I mostly speak of how your character progresses. Still, this mmo I truley one of my favorite mmos of all time. I find it even better than just about any mmo that you have to pay a monthley fee for.
I have started playing this game a few day ago. 3 day ago to be exact and i'm curently at level 18 with my friends. some say that you can level faster but we are taking our time with this one. So far, we are enjoying the game. It has a lot of things(system, gamestyle, side quest, and in-game activities) that we keeps us interested in-game. we were chatting with high level characters and is excited on the guild and even the nation system they have. well, maybe you should give it a try 'coz, comparing the videos out there we watched and the actual gameplay, it has a lot more to offer. that i assure you.
I'm sorry but turn based = Fail for me. Tried it but was boring ... great graphics and I was really trying to get into it but couldn't get past the stop and start of Turn Based. Hell I would set a fight and go make a sandwich (not really but u get the idea). Too bad to I was really looking forward to fighting Dracula and other well know monsters it purports to have.
The other day in Free League I beat someone 8 levels above me and they had one more merc. Of course I thought I was King of the World. In my next fight I was matched up against a player who I had previously beaten 6 levels below me... needless to say I lost! It was mainly my own fault for being so complacent. My point is, battles are far from boring and require a good amount of thought and planning. Even equal/higher level mob battles can go a little sour if you're just mashing attack all the time.
If you enjoy the old Final Fantasy style RPGs, I'd say there's a very good chance you'll get into this game (and it's free!). I'm actually going to step away for a couple of days, I've been playing way to much lately.
this game is more unique, deep, and complex than pretty much all of the MMOs listed on the sidebar of the MMORPG forums except EVE Online.
in nearly every aspect, from Combat, to Crafting, to Guilds/Nations/City Control, to Economics.
it is absolutely nothing like any MMORPG I've ever played before.
and that is why I am slowly getting hooked on it.
It's pretty easy when you only have 3 characters to handle and are fighting small mobs. But once you get 5, it's hard to move them all in 30 seconds, at least making the proper move (which you need to do in some fights when you fight a lot of enemies, or another person).
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
Uh, I don't know HOW you'd have trouble picking moves for 5 characters in a 30-second limit... click the one you want / press it's hotkey to select it, and then attack. About 5% of the time you may use one of it's extremely small number of skills. I rarely need to use their skills at all, unless I'm grinding in a tough new area or facing off a boss. I played this thing for two months so this isn't one of those "I played for 5 minutes and got bored" kind of posts.
- - -[ Pros ]- - -
- Extremely well-designed community tools (when compared to other MMOs, especially F2P ones). When was the last time you saw a block/ignore function in any other MMO? A peer list so you can talk to players of similar levels? An artisan list so you can ask people who have high levels in a particular craft? A newbie list so you can find newbies to help? Trust me, this game has the best community tools I've seen, not counting MUDs but then again those are heavily RP and only appeal to a small niche kind of playerbase.
- - -[ Cons ]- - -
- Extremely limited customization. What makes your swordsman different from mine? Or from your other swordsmen, for that matter? Only equipment (of which there isn't that great of a variety either), or additional random stats provided you drink those stat potions (they don't even make that big a difference either).
- - - - - -
Let's talk about strategy. Everybody and his dog seems to be parroting the line of bull that this game is so deep, blah blah. What the hell? Did all of you only ever play shooting games before this? Hasn't anybody played any console based RPGs before? At all? As a strategy gamer, I find the options in Atlantica Online extremely limited, and I can't believe I'm the only one who noticed.
Sure, you have various different classes, each with their different target patterns. But that's about it. The vast majority of the time you'll just be using your mercs' melee attacks. Nobody, and I mean nobody, skillspams. Precisely because there ARE no skills to be spammed - the ones that are available don't really do that much for you. Each merc type has exactly 2-3 skills which can be learned in the entirety of it's lifetime. The combos are mostly limited to the special skills only available to mainchar-type mercs, and not the rabble you hire.
Hire more than one type of the same merc (e.g. two swordmen), and tell me how different you feel they are? Not much, right? How about three swordsmen? Even more of the same. Face it, for the most part, the only difference between the different mercs is their attack types, and whether they can tank or not (if they can, they can sit in the front rank - if not, then they need to sit in the middle or behind). Otherwise there's very little to distinguish between swordsman #1 and swordsman #2. Hell, I find very little difference between swordsmen and the higher level tank classes which replace them: they have better stats (and this affects your strategy how? they're still tanks), and they still have only 2-3 skills. Which you still won't be spamming either.
Hell, to pick a well-known example RPG, Suikoden (an RPG franchise which started in the 1990s) already had front/back rows, with characters who had different attacks. The difference is, Suikoden's multitude of characters had combo/team attacks depending on which of the 108 possible characters you had on the team.
Or, let's look at another famous RPG, FF7. There are fewer characters here (more in keeping with the number of classes Atlantica has), and there's only really one row (standing in front or behind only affects how much melee damage you deal/take), but each character has way more combat options than the simple melee attack and 1-2 skills an Atlantica merc has. In fact what any FF7 character can do/cast is limited only by what materia he/she is equipped with.
- - - - - -
So in Atlantica, your strategic options are basically limited to (1) the type of mercs you hire, and (2) how you arrange them in the party. As shown, each merc type has it's own attack pattern (e.g. a spearman can hit up to 2 rows in the same column), but there's very little difference between mercs of the same type (i.e. swordsman #1 will perform exactly like swordsman #2). How you arrange them doesn't matter all THAT much since you only need to answer one question: does this guy sit in the front (can it tank?), or does he sit behind a tank? If he sits behind, then it doesn't really matter how you want to arrange your back rankers. You might want to spread them around a bit in order not to get hit by multitarget attacks (e.g. the row-piercingness of spears and guns or the column-wide hit of cannons) - but that's it: it doesn't affect their own attack patterns. As long as they sit behind a tank, and don't cluster up too much, it doesn't really matter how you arrange them.
I love Atlantica's community tools, really - being able to talk to similar-leveled players (the peer list) and being able to block idiots and spammers (the block list) are features that should be in every goddamn MMO. The stamina feature is a nice way of nudging players in a helpful direction, and the arena/tournament system is heads up - way up - above the stupid pk gankfests of other F2Ps.
That said, however, the rest of the game itself is rather shallow, especially if you consider yourself a strategy gamer, and have played the oodles of strategy games out there. I mean, I didn't even talk about the grid-based strategy games (FFT, the Atlus games, etc). The quests are your usual F2P fare, although the town-based and guild-based ones are a nice addition (about goddamn time too). Upgrading is decent, crafting is so-so. Visually, I don't really give a damn, although by utilizing a Pixel Shader 2.0 engine they really did a disservice to mid-to-low end video cards. Especially since this game doesn't need anywhere near the graphical horsepower a traditional realtime combat F2P game needs. They should've included more lower end settings. Sound and music are ok, but again, like graphics, this is all just icing on the cake, they don't really matter unless you're trying to decide between two equally interesting games.
" In Defeat, Malice; In Victory, Revenge! "
Now, your comparison to old-school single-player console RPG and Strategy games is cool and valid. That's your perspective.
however, Atlantica is more of a MMORPG than a Strategy title. It's a RPG with strategy elements, so to speak. That's where your comparison is faulty, in my opinion.
It's like comparing Rainbow Six Vegas with Icewind Dale, because Vegas has a rpg-like leveling/customization system.
We're looking at this game from two different angles.
You are looking at it in comparison to Suikoden, FF Tactics, FF7 and games like that.
I'm looking at it in comparison to WoW, Warhammer Online, EQ2, LOTRO, etc.
wildly different opinions, depending on how you are looking at the game, really.
that said, from my perspective, my opinion as stated in a previous post, stands.
cause its just plain fun. I have seen some dorks say "oh, its just a grindfest" but i really dont think those ppl should even be playing a MMO or even truely understand what a MMO is, to me those ppl are looking for some FPS or just like to whine in general.
When I said i had "time", i meant virtual time, i got no RL "time" for you.
nice one chance!!! i totally agree with you! if you dont like the game, then GTFO! AO lives!!!
Why?
Here is why I think people might like it:
Played:
From Earth & Beyond, Anarchy Online, Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa (Beta), EvE Online, City of Villians, Atlantica Online, Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, PlanetSide, RF Online, Second Life, Fallen Earth.
While I agree with some (little) of what Trucidation says, much of his post is about setting up a strawman and knocking it down. While I agree that Atlantica isn't the most strategic game available, it is far more strategic than he'd like you to think. My opinion is that for some reason he is equating a lack of many, many options with lack of strategy, when the two are not correlated. Also be aware that the points of his post have more validity in (certain) PvE, and very little validity when it comes to PvP. I would guess he has played the game in passing and formed some opinions based on not very much information.
"Let's talk about strategy. Everybody and his dog seems to be parroting the line of bull that this game is so deep, blah blah. What the hell? Did all of you only ever play shooting games before this? Hasn't anybody played any console based RPGs before? At all? As a strategy gamer, I find the options in Atlantica Online extremely limited, and I can't believe I'm the only one who noticed."
I'm curious, when did the number of options become the determining factor of whether something is strategic? Chess, perhaps the perfect strategic game, has only 6 types of pieces. Worse yet, they can each only move in one certain pattern! (with some exceptions) Does all of that somehow make it not very strategic? There are literally hundreds or thousands of strategies in Chess, developed over the 500 years we've had the game in our current form, and the centuries variations existed before that.
How about Texas Hold'em, or poker in general? There are only a handful of actions you can take in the entire game! (Check, Call, Fold, Raise, Re-Raise, Bet) That must mean it is not very strategic, right? I'd suggest the folks consistently winning the game and making vast sums of money would disagree. There are many levels of nuance and strategy in Poker that if you are not aware of, you will likely lose (Assuming high-level play, not the average Wednesday-night house game).
How about Go? Or Othello? They only have 1 type of piece! That must surely make them the most non-strategic games ever, right? Go try out a Go grand-master and come back and let me know how that works for you. If there is no strategy in a game with just one piece, it's probably just like flipping a coin to determine the winner, right? Play 10 games with them and tell me how many you win. (I'll bet none)
"Sure, you have various different classes, each with their different target patterns. But that's about it. The vast majority of the time you'll just be using your mercs' melee attacks. Nobody, and I mean nobody, skillspams."
I'm curious, did you play much beyond Rank 18 Free League? No offense, but this comment alone calls into question your entire assertion, because it is unarguably wrong. Skillspam becomes incredibly prominent in high level PvP, even if you are running a stun build. Many, many turns in high level free league go something like: Flame Sword, Flame Sword, Freezing Axe, Beast Summon, Meteor Swarm...or Blessing of Life, Awakening, Mana Seal, Deep Insight, Chaos Wind.
"Precisely because there ARE no skills to be spammed - the ones that are available don't really do that much for you. Each merc type has exactly 2-3 skills which can be learned in the entirety of it's lifetime. The combos are mostly limited to the special skills only available to mainchar-type mercs, and not the rabble you hire."
Don't do much for you? I almost question whether you have even played the game past level 10. If you aren't using the skills available to your mercs, you will never, ever be competitive in Atlantica. I would gladly propose a challenge. I'll even give myself a couple handicaps; I'll use 8 mercs level 70-79 (or 50-59, or 60-69) with full use of skills and equipped with appropriate level +0 gear. You can use on additional merc (9), 70-79, no skills, and +1 gear. And I'll win. Every time. And so would any halfway decent player. Perhaps at level 10-20 your assertion has some (slight) weight, but not over the majority of the game.
"Hire more than one type of the same merc (e.g. two swordmen), and tell me how different you feel they are? Not much, right? How about three swordsmen? Even more of the same. Face it, for the most part, the only difference between the different mercs is their attack types, and whether they can tank or not (if they can, they can sit in the front rank - if not, then they need to sit in the middle or behind). Otherwise there's very little to distinguish between swordsman #1 and swordsman #2. Hell, I find very little difference between swordsmen and the higher level tank classes which replace them: they have better stats (and this affects your strategy how? they're still tanks), and they still have only 2-3 skills. Which you still won't be spamming either."
So they're not different? Neither are Pawns, or Knights, or Go pieces. See my comments on Chess and Go above. I think you are again equating 'complexity' with strategy. Each unit has a role, and how you combine all of the roles determines the overall strategy of your formation.
"How you arrange them doesn't matter all THAT much since you only need to answer one question: does this guy sit in the front (can it tank?), or does he sit behind a tank? If he sits behind, then it doesn't really matter how you want to arrange your back rankers. You might want to spread them around a bit in order not to get hit by multitarget attacks (e.g. the row-piercingness of spears and guns or the column-wide hit of cannons) - but that's it: it doesn't affect their own attack patterns. As long as they sit behind a tank, and don't cluster up too much, it doesn't really matter how you arrange them."
Again, this is an indication that you don't understand the dynamics of the game. If you think that how you arrange your back rankers doesn't matter (much), you don't understand the various options you can use in placement. Take the witch, which is potentially the most important piece to place (because it is the only merc available with Flying). Does it go in the center, where it can prevent artillery from hitting more than 3 units, of their max 5? Does it go on a side, where it can make an axe-unit hit only 2 pieces instead of 3? Does it go in front, where it can use its high Magic Defense as a shield to the unit behind? Did you know Magic Defense also determines how much a piece is healed for, so that if your Witch is not killed in one turn, it can often be fully healed by one spell? To continue, you never mentioned anything about placement of your main, which is a huge consideration. If you are playing a Monk, do you try to draw some fire by putting your ranged/staff main in the front row for a few turns because it will be healed by Protect? Do you put it in the back row to give it the most longevity? Do you place your monk and shaman in different rows, risking a silence to prevent a stun? Where you place each and every piece is vitally important, and if you don't think so, you'll do a lot of losing. As another challenge, I would suggest the same thing as I did above, except I get to place all of your back row pieces where I want and you can't move them. In this case, not only will I win, but I will likely win without losing more than a single piece.
"That said, however, the rest of the game itself is rather shallow, especially if you consider yourself a strategy gamer, and have played the oodles of strategy games out there. "
I am a strategy gamer, and I have (and do) play oodles of strategy games. However, I realize that equating complexity with strategy is incongrous, because there can be non-strategic games with tons of complexity, and incredibly strategic games with almost no complexity. As I stated in the beginning, Atlantica is not the epitome of strategy games; however, the game does have several layers of deep, rich strategy that will keep true strategy gamers on their toes for a good long time.
I play on Argos, if you'd to take me up on the challenge or just to chat, drop a note!
Well, all I can say is, that hasn't been my experience. Some of the fights lately (like vs the Hell Spiders) are very very tough (even though I'm 45 and they are 42), and I have to micro-manage my guys. (As well as fights vs more than one mob at a time, that seems to be more common).
It's not just moving your guys, but picking which guys. Sometmes you want a guy that won't move this turn (because you can only move 5 guys per turn), but can move (because his AP is high enough), so you have to use guard.
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
i guess it depends on your items and build.. i think its importan if you use growth vials...
And finally it all boils down to this:
If your one of the 300,000 or so people who enjoy EVE Online you'll probably enjoy Atlantica Online. All others move along ... nothing to see here.
I like atlantica online because it keeps up with my different moods:
-when im feeling adventurous, i use maps and locate treasure chests
-when i have other things to do like eat or go out, i craft and leave it
-when im feeling lazy grinding, i put it on auto battle and watch TV
-when i feel like kicking someone's ass, i do PvP's
It is simple. Play the game reach level 50 and then that would be the time you can answer your question.
trapezonian is right. when you got to level 50 you will feel that you dont want to sign out anymore because you really want to play more and more.. i like doing the quest and getting some mercenary quest.. i really want to prepare myself for the free league and pvp.. so i want to become stronger and beat those other players.. i want to level up more and more because of this. and i want to try those higher level mercenaries.